fugitive peace

Each day this week I’ll be putting up my post from the correspondent’s diary on The Economist’s website. The events described took place two weeks ago. The story I published based on that reporting is here.

Nablus finds itself squeezed on all sides

“RAMADAN kareem” is the traditional greeting during the Muslim holy month. “Ramadan k…” begins my Palestinian fixer when I pick her up this morning, but what follows is a choice Arabic curse that would cause another Danish-cartoon-style uproar if I printed it here.

She hates Ramadan, with its total fasting from dawn-to-dusk. Her feet hurt, her joints hurt, her children whine, people are irritable, everything shuts early, vast numbers of guests must be fed at the evening iftar meal. “I fast in order to work up more anger at the Israeli occupation,” she says, perhaps only half in jest. But she spends the rest of the day venting spleen in equal measure at racist Israelis, hypocritical Muslims, backward Arabs and the whole stinking world in general.

I have asked her to set up a West Bank Grand Tour. Since Hamas defeated Fatah’s forces in Gaza in a bloody showdown in June, the American-Israeli-Fatah plan has been to try to defeat Hamas by making Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, more popular.

The method: strangle Gaza’s economy, make life better in the West Bank, and hold peace talks with Mr Abbas. The people of Gaza will suffer—are suffering—but that is the price the civilised world has decreed they must pay for finding themselves trapped in the middle of a factional bust-up. I want to know how well it’s working.

Our first stop is Nablus. Nestled in a majestic valley, it’s one of the most picturesque Palestinian cities. And one of the poorest. It is known both for its traders and for its terrorists (from both Hamas and Fatah), and the Israeli checkpoints that have gone up around it since the intifada have effectively closed off the rest of the West Bank to many of its businesses, shrivelling its economy. Much of the male population is forbidden from leaving at all.

We stop in at a cardboard packaging company, now running at 40% of its pre-intifada capacity. The manager tells me he thinks Israel’s plan is to make life in Gaza better, not worse, so that Palestinians will leave the West Bank and go live in the tiny, overcrowded coastal strip.

I must look sceptical. “You find this strange?” he asks. He gives his chair a shove and rolls back towards the window. Red-roofed Jewish settlements are perched on the hilltops all around, boxing Nablus in, causing a shortage of housing land. He gestures at them. “These people are not leaving. They are investing. They are here to stay. It’s very difficult to tell them to go back to the 1967 border; that’s become history now.”

I can see why he thinks so. Since the Gaza pullout in 2005, the Israeli government has managed to evacuate one West Bank settlement outpost of just nine houses—to terrific settler resistance—while several other new ones have gone up. Israeli governing coalitions are unstable by nature and getting more so; in the face of the settlers’ single-mindedness, they are virtually impotent.

We head on and meet two “Islamists”, as Hamas members have started calling themselves since the Palestinian Authority (PA) began arresting them—as if it might save them. They are of a type I have come to expect: jolly, roly-poly men with neatly trimmed beards. The first looks so much like a rabbi that I glance at the crown of his head looking for the black skullcap.

His flat overlooks one of Nablus’s tough, volatile refugee camps, a maze of tightly-packed slum housing. He takes me upstairs to show me the empty flats above, where Israeli soldiers periodically break in to get a better shot at wanted militants. He says the soldiers have written warnings on the doors, but the childish Hebrew scrawl—“Please, there are no living here”—with misshapen letters curling into their Arabic equivalents, is clearly the hand of a local.

The second Islamist, who got out of Israeli custody only to be arrested by the Palestinians, describes how a fellow prisoner was blindfolded and made to kneel with his hands tied. When he subsided on to his haunches from exhaustion, they hit him. I mention that it sounds like the way Israeli jailers commonly treated Palestinians until the courts banned the practice. “No,” my interviewee says. “Worse than the Israelis.”

As an internal exercise last week I wrote an imaginary memo for Tony Blair, who made his first public statements as the Quartet’s special envoy yesterday. It didn’t become a leader in The Economist (this did, alongside a piece I wrote on Olmert’s remarkable capacity for survival). So I rewrote it and sent it to foreignpolicy.com, where it’s also up.

Blair’s mandate is to build up Palestinian institutions while nudging Israel to ease impediments to the economy (pdf) in the West Bank, in the hope that this will boost Abbas and weaken support for Hamas. He’s supposed to leave the big political issues to Abbas and Olmert to hash out in advance of the November/December summit—though nobody seriously expects him to stay out of them entirely. But James Wolfensohn, the last Quartet envoy, ultimately failed, and his mandate was limited to trying to get an economic recovery going in Gaza. I don’t envy Blair his task. Here’s why.

1. Don’t underestimate the Palestinian street’s distrust of you. Not because you supported the Iraq war—Palestinians care much more about their own problems. But most of them assume that you are here to recreate a pro-Western Palestinian client state in the best case (which is essentially true), and cooperate with Israel to ensure that an independent Palestine never arises in the worst case.
2. Don’t underestimate the extent to which Palestinian leaders will undermine the national interest to protect their personal ones. Learn all the rivalries—those within Fatah especially—and assume that they take precedence over good sense and decency, unless you see evidence to the contrary.
3. Don’t underestimate the incompetence and backstabbing at senior levels in the Palestinian institutions, including Abbas’s office. Improving equipment for the Palestinian police or training for mid-level bureaucrats is easy. The stumbling blocks to progress will be individual officials with privileges and influence who want to hold on to them.
4. Don’t rely too much on Abbas to make changes. He is timid and non-confrontational. He has got to where he is by making his peace with some of the most corrupt and obstructionist Fatah leaders. His reluctance to remove difficult people, create enemies and upset political balances will be one of your main constraints.
5. Similarly, don’t overestimate Israeli leaders’ ability to deliver on promises. One reason is political: Ehud Olmert’s coalition government looks solid at the moment, but the winds can shift and allies can become opponents with astonishing rapidity. The other reason is operational. Even if the government orders something, its authority can quickly peter out on the ground in the West Bank, where settlement leaders and local army commanders are used to a high degree of autonomy, and sympathetic bureaucrats often help them find ways around the law.
6. At the same time, don’t buy all the Israelis’ excuses. Olmert knows better than anyone how to use coalition politics to his advantage—including to make it look like he’s hemmed in when he isn’t.
7. Be wary of the support of other Arab leaders. Having them on board for the November summit and beyond is essential to this process’s credibility, and yours. But each has his own agenda on the Palestinian question, which depends on how it affects his internal domestic issues. You’ll need to find a balance between having them involved and keeping them at arms’ length.
8. For all these reasons, try to create a clear and public plan with identifiable goals. If you don’t set goals, the street will distrust your motives and the leaders will exploit uncertainties to their own ends. Setting goals may set you up for failure, but at least then you’ll be able to pin blame on those who deserve it.
9. Don’t take your eye off the long term. It’s tempting to focus on what’s immediately achievable—some checkpoints removed here, better policing there, more funding for schools, more ties between Israeli and Palestinian businesses. These are good, but they will make no difference to Palestinians’ opinions of Fatah—or of you—unless they perceive them as stepping stones in a longer-term plan with statehood at the end. Israel wants to keep this timetable vague; you need to find something that can give Palestinians hope.
10. Resist the urge simply to forget about Gaza “for the time being”. It’s a natural temptation; indeed, your mandate pretty much requires it. Hamas is in charge there; it hates Israel; Israel and America hate it; Fatah hates it even more. Surely the best thing is to leave Gaza to fester so Hamas loses popularity. But watch out: The more Hamas weakens, the more Gaza’s clan chieftains will take over. Every clan contain members of both parties, and their clan loyalty comes first. Once Gaza is run by warlords, imposing any sort of political order there will be extremely hard. Even though it’s not part of your mandate, start thinking about the mechanism for the eventual transition, otherwise your efforts will be worthless.

When I was in Russia, where hard information was like gold dust, people would occasionally start rumours for a bet. You won a prize if the rumour made it into the press. It’s a risky game. Doing some interviews in Ramallah yesterday, I - through a simple misunderstanding - accidentally started the rumour that a prestigious charity led by a very important Palestinian personage was among the NGOs being investigated for administrative irregularities. I got the rumour quashed, but not before the important personage had called up the chief of staff of the interior ministry demanding to know what was going on.

But another rumour I heard yesterday seems to be gaining credibility, though I haven’t yet seen it reported outside the Arabic and Israeli media. This is that Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians’ long-time chief negotiator and one of their most public spokesmen, is about to lose his job - even as Olmert and Abbas negotiate an agreement of principles for the peace conference due in November.

Why Erekat would go now is unclear (I haven’t yet gotten hold of him myself to ask), but that hasn’t stopped le tout Ramallah from speculating. Some say it’s because he’s been ineffective in setting the Palestinian agenda for the current talks. Others think maybe he’s been leaking to the press too much about the talks - which he may have done, but I doubt it’s a firing offence. Or perhaps it’s because he and Salam Fayyad, the prime minister, don’t get on too well; but would Abbas really let Fayyad meddle in negotiations to that extent? Finally and most conspiratorially, it’s that Erekat is being cleared aside for the ex-prime minister and chief negotiator of the Oslo Accords, Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa).

My sources are silent on this, and Abu Alaa’s office reportedly denied it. Why would he be put into such a job? A friend reminds me that Abu Alaa and Shimon Peres came up with a peace plan in 2001, after the intifada broke out, which called for creating a Palestinian state in stages. In their original version, Israel would recognise a Palestinian state in the areas already under Palestinian Authority control, and the final borders and other issues would be dealt with later. Could they be planning a re-run, in which Israel recognises a Palestinian state in the West Bank, and leaves Gaza until later?

Perhaps - though if that were the intention, you surely wouldn’t need Abu Alaa and Peres themselves to make it happen. In any case, it’s far from clear that Abu Alaa is taking over. But if Erekat is indeed leaving, it may signal some kind of shift in the Olmert-Abbas talks, which seem to have produced little progress up to now.

(And if anyone bet a bottle of champagne that the rumour about Abu Alaa would get published: congratulations, and please would you save me a glass?)

Just back from seeing “Jerusalem - The East Side Story”, which was being screened to a selection of Ramallah’s great and good, among them Rafiq Husseini, Mahmoud Abbas’s chief of staff. Unlike “West Bank Story“, an Oscar-winning musical comedy about rival Israeli and Palestinian falafel families, this is a worthy but relentless litany of the injustices Israel has visited on the Palestinians of East Jerusalem in its attempts to create a unified Jewish capital.

The film is largely (and tragically) accurate, but like most propaganda in this conflict, makes too few nods to the other side’s narrative to win over many viewers who don’t already sympathise with its message. For 70 minutes the narrator pummels us in the doom-laden tone that wildlife presenters usually reserve for the moment when a nestful of cute goslings is about to be devoured by a feral cat. You come out wanting to slit your veins, or preferably the narrator’s. Still, it has two good moments.

One is an interview with Husseini’s boss, the president of Palestine, recounting one of his favourite to-camera stories: how he showed the map of Israel’s separation barrier to George Bush in 2003. According to Abbas (though it varies slightly with each telling), Bush was furious and told Dick Cheney, “this is not a state”. Abbas looks proud and self-satisfied. The audience, until then respectfully transfixed, started laughing and jeering. They jeered even more when Bush appeared, awkwardly telling the press, “This wall is… uh… a problem.” I wished I could have seen Husseini’s face at that point.

The second is of an elderly Palestinian woman, with title deeds and old photos in hand, coming to see the house in West Jerusalem that she fled as a child. The camera follows her as a group of Israelis strolls past. She watches them recede, then sums up the whole conflict as well and as succinctly as anyone I’ve ever heard. “We live in fantasy,” she sighs, “and they live in denial.”